Other People Behead People, Too!
There was an absolutely idiotic piece of pandering on Slate last week about how Muslims aren't the only people who behead people. I meant to blog it, and forgot, but was reminded of it when I saw a piece about it on JihadWatch. An excerpt:

Slate notes that "a Muslim man was accused of beheading his wife last week" -- a cursory and uninformative way to explain what happened in Buffalo last week -- and Slate's Explainer feature today undertakes to explain whether or not there is "any special significance to beheading in Islam." And the answer that The Explainer gives us is...Well, yes, but other people do it too!

Longtime Jihad Watch readers, and particularly readers of Hugh Fitzgerald's remarkable body of work, will know that this is a logical fallacy known as tu quoque -- an attempt to mitigate one's responsibility for a wrongdoing by pointing out that others also, perhaps even the accuser, do the same thing. It is a fallacy because it doesn't matter how many men behead their wives, it is wrong in every case. If the men are Christians, or Jews, or Hindus, or Buddhists, or Muslims, or atheists, it is wrong. If a Christian beheads his wife, it doesn't mean that the Muslim who beheads his wife the following week is somehow less responsible for his deed than he otherwise would have been. And if that Muslim beheads his wife because he believes that to do so is in line with Islamic texts and teachings, then those texts and teachings have to be addressed in some way -- discarded, reevaluated, reinterpreted -- in order to try to prevent recurrence of the behavior. And the existence of similar texts or teachings in other traditions does nothing to make this confrontation any less necessary.

Tu quoque is also misplaced in this instance, as in most instances, because it simply isn't true. There is justification in Islamic Scripture and tradition for beheading, and Muslims throughout history have considered that in beheading people they have been following the dictates of the Qur'an and Sunnah, and the example of Muhammad. And people who behead other people today are not exclusively Muslim, but they are overwhelmingly Muslims who are doing so in accord with the dictates of Islam. There simply aren't Jews or Christians beheading people and citing the example of David and Goliath, or Judith and Holofernes.

Why does this matter? Because to call attention to Biblical passages that no one believes are applicable in today's world, as if they were the equivalent of Qur'anic passages that are considered applicable today by jihadists the world over, is simply to avoid the hard work of scrutinizing how Islamic texts and teachings may have influenced Muzzammil Hassan as he came to believe that his wife must be beheaded -- and to sidestep the necessity of doing something about those texts and teachings so that there are no more Muzzammil Hassans.

By the way, Robert W. wrote me noting, as others have, that it's pretty amazing how little coverage the beheading got in the media. I did see people picking up on the story in the past week -- there were pieces on CNN, for example. But, I think people in this country like to believe that beheading is aberrant behavior, and not as common as it actually is in Islam.